Antarctic Press’ ‘Bad Kids’ comic headed to big screen

Get ready for a darker spin on “The Breakfast Club,” and with a San Antonio connection at that. “Bad Kids Go to Hell” is headed to the big screen from the pages of S.A.’s own Antarctic Press, courtesy the comic’s writers Matthew Spradlin and Barry Wernick. USA Today reports the indie horror/comedy will premiere at Comic-Con International, appropriately enough, Friday July 13.

Spradlin and Wernick wrote the “Bad Kids” screenplay with Spradlin directing. They originally crafted it as a screenplay in 2006, but the subsequent Writers’ Strike in Hollywood steered them to realize it as an Antarctic four-issue miniseries in 2009 with art by Anthony Vargas. USA Today notes Spradlin and Wernick have a sequel comic in the works but there’s no mention of Antarctic for that follow-up. Antarctic says they haven’t heard any word either.

“Bad Kids” throws the John Hughes’ ’85 classic “Breakfast Club” into “The Grudge” territory with six prep-school teens stuck in a Saturday detention that picks them off one by spoiled one. The question is, are the supernatural legends of Crestview Academy behind the deadly brat-attacks or is it just one of their own secretly whittling down the social pecking order? Call it a new kind of demented and sad but social, with John Bender himself Judd Nelson starring as the Crestview headmaster.